There seem to be a clockworked roster at TheTelgraph (online) otherwise known as the Sunday Telegraph and the Daily Telgraph (in print) to bash anyone who understands the science and ramifications of global warming. One weekend, it will be Miranda Devine. On another it will be Andrew Bold following a spill from the Saturday and Weekly Telegraph. Andrew Bolt is prolific and seems to never stop the quiet outrage, even in his sleep. So do we, we do not sleep.

Today, it's Piers Akerman turn to demonise the "warmists" at TheTelegraph. Akerman's attention on the global warming shooting gallery focus on China, India and on the Prime Minister, Malcolm Turnbull. 

Says Piers Akerman:

AS predicted, the great Paris global warming conference has turned to custard.

China, which is home to more billionaires than any other nation, and India, second only to China in terms of population, along with a gaggle of other opportunistic nations are demanding hundreds of billions of dollars from the developed world to meet the unproven challenge of man-made climate change.

With breathtaking arrogance, the clamorous pseuds gathered in the French capital without care for their massive carbon footprint claim to have the power to control the temperature of Earth — given enough of your money.

This is such a preposterous notion that no one at the conference will even state the obvious — its impossibility.

Instead, we have self- anointed, self-righteous, self-important lackeys of the UN claiming that global warming is responsible for extreme weather (despite zero evidence), poverty (hardly), drought and floods (that’s tricky), family violence (what about the TV remote), Middle Eastern violence (where’s that in the Koran), prostitution and alcoholism (they would, wouldn’t they).The more than 4000 delegates and assorted hangers-on are actually perpetuating the greatest fraud since we were warned that the Y2K bug would send aircraft into tailspins, freeze elevators, close bank accounts and crash the internet (warmist Al Gore’s claimed invention).

(Link is paywalled I guess)
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Very funny, Piers, very funny, but not amusing. Sad actually. For your info, the Y2K was present in a few old computer chips and if nothing nasty happened is partly because there was a quiet army of dedicated technicians who were sent to replace some of these old chips. Major problem did not occur as the clock on old computers, like mine, reverted to counting from 1900, but for some tickers, I know, the result could have been catastrophic.

You restrainly mention only 4,000 delegates to this useless warming gabfest, though some people tally more than 20,000, all together producing more conference-CO2 than Mexico. 

The economics of such agreements are frightfully complex and everyone is trying to do as little as possible, even those who can see some cash in renewables. Working on complex solution that are not as easy as burning the place down are so bothersome. There is some laziness in the madness of it all. 

Hey mate, do you remember a few years ago when the scientists mentioned 2 (two) degrees C by 2100 as a benchmark to avoid? This limit was set on the temperature increase from about 1900 average temperature with the amount of CO2 we had spewed in the atmosphere and a great hope to curb emissions substantially. Now the new scientific benchmark is 2.7 degrees C by 2100. The science is correctly conservative on this assessment despite whatever you say to poopoo the science.

Should the increase of global temperature of this glorious year 2015 be a trend, we should start to worry a bit more. So far the temperature increase for 2015 has been 0.15 degree C on the NEW average (counted since 1950). This is really peanuts in isolation but as a possible trend this represents 1.5 degree C increase by decade and about 14 degrees C increase by 2100 with compounding effect. I hope you have stocked up on sun-cream, guns and air conditioners.

Hopefully, there will some years in the future where the increase will be negative, giving folks like you, the "reason" to claim that global warming has stopped and is regressing. Not looking at proper facts and real figures is the privilege of such "reason".

Much has been said about the outrageous Chinese billionaires and of the caste poverty of India. Nothing is clear cut here. Some people are richer than others by luck and by greed — and who cares about those who live in slavery, poverty and especially those poor folks who refuse to buy off-grid "funny" electricity, because being on the grid is a status symbol in a country where less poverty is defecating in the street... 

And the weather vagaries cannot be blamed on global warming. We know that. Though the mechanics of climate can be influenced and modified by global warming. We should know that. If you have not noticed this in the last 40 years, you're an idiot, a blind man or are too young, still in nappies with the wisdom of a philosophical gnat.

But if you observe a few piers on Sydney's foreshore, you would have noted something with your name on it. At high tide, the water laps the beams. Even on a calm day, the water splashes over the planks on a full moon. Most of these piers were built to be at least a foot above the highest theoretical king tide.

In the last ten years, the sea level has risen by a tiny weeny 3 centimetres. on top of about 16 centimetres since 1900. Ten years ago, the Insurance Industry — bless that industry where gambling on your bad luck is profitable, especially when you suffer from good luck — accounted that the sea level had risen 16 centimetres since 1900. With this industry, things like that are empirical. This industry measures catastrophes by the amount of cash it has to fork out when the bad weather is stretched beyond their weighted predictions. This is why it doesn't insure some risks. 

Piers gloriously and triumphantly ends up with:

The draft calls for developed countries to provide “at least 1 per cent of gross domestic product per year from 2020 and additional funds during the pre-2020 period to the GCF,” which would act as the “main operating entity of the Financial Mechanism” under the new treaty, according to the draft.

Forget it. Taxpayers should demand that Turnbull call Paris and tell the Australian delegation to get out to Charles de Gaulle airport tout suite and fly home.

Unfortunately, he has yet to show any spine when it comes to confronting the Left. It is not in his nature. Disappointingly, his wife, Lucy, the newly appointed chairman of the Greater Sydney Commission, is also ‐ displaying the same tendencies. She is on the board of the Leftist think tank, the Grattan Institute. 

Little wonder that Liberals are concerned about the direction their party is taking under Turnbull’s leadership.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?


I was wondering when Piers was going to mention the TAXPAYERS...

Piers, WE THINK you're a clever idiot at the employ of the outrage industry — paid to savage (not salvage) the future of this planet. But we cannot say this without a bit of debunking. There is wisdom and there is knowledge. The trick of the outrage industry is to appear wisdomful without much knowledge. The facts and figures sometimes quoted by the outrage industry are plucked, chosen carefully, modified and selectively misconstrued to suit this outrage.

In a way we can see the process behind this. It's, forgive me to mention it once again, quite Aristotelian. In the Aristotelian world, according to my philosophy instructor, reason and argumentation trumps experiment and observation. Experiments and observations are alien to elegant reasoning. This world of argumented deduction is flying close to sophistry and blind beliefs, because "reason knows better than nature". We invented god that way... This thinking was sort of debunked in the 19th century, but obviously it still flourishes at TheTelegraph.


In regard to China and India, we should look at this naughty article published in Grist and reproduced in Mother Jones. I say nasty because it presents the facts:

India is the world's third-largest greenhouse gas emitter, simply by virtue of having 1.25 billion people. But it is extremely poor: 300 million of its citizens lack electricity. While the US has a gross domestic product (GDP) per capita of $54,630 and 16.6 tons per person of annual carbon emissions, for India those figures are only $1,596 and 1.7 tons. And so India, the Times notes, "has positioned itself as the champion of developing nations." Specifically, that means it is offering only to reduce carbon emissions per dollar of GDP, not in total (as well as take steps such as ramping up renewables). If developing countries are to leapfrog over the dirty phase of economic growth that rich countries have gone through, India argues, that will require major investments in renewable energy—and the rich world needs to help pay for it.

But is this focus on India misplaced? It's true that the unwillingness of developing nations to commit to future emissions cuts is a problem that stands in the way of limiting emissions. The best-case scenario based on current national pledges at the COP 21 talks in Paris is keeping warming below 2.7 degrees C, which would still lead to catastrophic climate changes, scientists say. Everyone is going to have to step it up several notches if we are to get from there down to 2 C or lower, the broadly accepted goal—and even that is higher than the 1.5 C that the most vulnerable countries are pushing for. But it's not true that the problem of political will or lack of economic sacrifice lies with the developing nations. The problem is us, the rich countries, most especially the US.

 

As of 2011, the US was responsible for 27 percent of the world's cumulative greenhouse gas emissions—the largest share of any country—and the European Union collectively accounted for 25 percent. India, with a current-day population much larger than the EU and US combined, had emitted 3 percent.

Rich countries—most especially the US—are responsible for the bulk of the problem, have almost all the capacity to fix it, and should be on the hook for the vast majority of the solution.

That doesn't mean rich countries are the only ones that need to cut emissions. Developing countries certainly need to cut them too—but rich countries need to pay up to help developing countries make those cuts.

 

For starters, developed countries should be committing to dramatically cut their emissions, rather than making modest cuts. Looking at their Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs), that isn't happening. The US is offering 26 to 28 percent cuts below 2005 levels by 2025. Japan offers a cut of 25 percent from 2005 levels by 2030, but that's somewhat deceptive because it's purchasing overseas offsets to get there, so Climate Action Tracker rates Japan's plan as "inadequate." Russia actually wants room for its emissions to grow. The best developed-world INDC comes from the EU, which pledges 40 percent cuts from 1990 levels by 2030.

And at the same time, developed countries haven't come close to contributing $100 billion per year in climate finance for poor countries, the goal set in Copenhagen in 2009 and intended to be achieved by 2020. Experts say even that goal is inadequate, in part because much of it is expected to come from the private sector, which is a shady form of accounting. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) stated in a recent paper that developed countries mobilized $57 billion in climate aid in 2013-2014, but India disputes that figure. While that specific argument is over technical measurements, there are more fundamental problems. Who knows that, say, a Western bank lending money for a clean energy project in India wouldn't have done so without its government's encouragement or loan guarantees? This doesn't mean those kinds of private-sector loans aren't useful additions, but they aren't a substitute for direct aid.

http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/12/paris-climate-change-cop21-climate-finance
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So what to make of all this? WHAT DO YOU THINK? Is global warming real? Is Piers a great philistine philosopher or not? Is Piers a deliberate ignoramus or a simple ignoramus in search of more elevating logical ignorance, with a cushy job at the Ignorant Telegraph to promote ignorance because, let's face it, ignorance is bliss? 

We should embrace the bliss, before we kiss our arse good bye. Caring for the planet is too hard... and for some too taxing on the taxpayers... and unnecessary because of reason which tells us eventually that global warming is not happening despite the evidence.

Gus Leoniksy
Your local Socrates fan club member.

 

 

ps: And by the way, Piers... Should we pay attention to the problem of global warming "tout de suite"? Yes!... I think your French is a bit wonky and condescending like the rest of your arguments.